Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  Another reason young people are disengaged is that they don’t pay much attention to the news. Less than 20% of young people read newspapers, and the average age of people watching CNN or the network evening news is around 60. (Have you noticed all the commercials for dentures and arthritis medications during these programs?) Young people may be getting some news from the Internet, but most use the Web for specific interests instead (what media expert Nicolas Negroponte calls “The Daily Me”). Only 32% of people aged 18 to 24 agree that they “need to get the news every day,” compared to 62% of those ages 55 to 64.

  As a result, young people know little about news and politics. David Mindich, author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News, found that 60% of American young people could not name a single Supreme Court justice, 48% did not know what Roe v. Wade was, and 62% could not name any of the three countries President George W. Bush had identified as the “axis of evil” (Iraq, Iran, and North Korea). In another poll, high school seniors were asked to say, in their opinion, the most important problem facing the country. One in three could not name a single issue. Christian Smith’s survey of 18-to-23-year-olds yielded similar results in 2008, with most young adults unable to name a political issue they cared about.

  Rock the Vote and MTV’s Choose or Lose spend a great deal of money and time encouraging voter registration among young people. Despite these efforts, even the 2008 youth voter turnout that got so much attention was lower than young Boomers’ turnout in 1972 and GenX’s in 1992.

  NO CONTROL ON THE BIG-SCREEN TV

  Media exposure probably explains a large part of the increase in externality. News broadcasts in the early 1960s were confined to a fifteen-minute evening segment. Can you imagine—only fifteen minutes of TV news? Now, four national cable channels cover the news twenty-four hours a day, and the networks have not only the daily thirty-minute broadcast but three-hour morning shows and several hours of local news every day.

  A lot of news coverage has turned to fluff about celebrities, television shows (starring celebrities), and movies (sometimes starring celebrities playing celebrities). Yet the “big” news stories—the ones to which CNN, FOX News, and MSNBC will devote twenty-four hours a day—are almost always bad news, and they’re almost always events that the average viewer cannot control.

  It’s not just large disasters; media outlets’ other favorite stories include plane crashes, mall shootings, school shootings, murders of pregnant women, child abductions, stock market crashes. Sitting in their living rooms, modern citizens may increasingly feel that they belong to a huge, complex, confusing, and terrible world that is utterly beyond their control to change.

  Media saturation has had an impact on GenMe. Not that long ago, many older folks thought that young people were idealistic and willing to believe the best of people. But that was before 6-year-olds wanted to know if they were safe at school, or asked why a congressman would send a young woman pictures of himself in his underwear. It’s not just that these events happened—sex scandals and mass deaths have occurred in every generation—but that their every detail is exposed on television. As author Neil Postman notes, “From the child’s point of view, what is mostly shown on television is the plain fact that the adult world is filled with ineptitude, strife, and worry.”

  It’s just one part in the larger trend of “kids growing up too fast.” Along with adult information and adult themes, they’ve also managed to absorb the cynicism that once came only with age. Some of this is simple self-protection brought on by information overload—much of it false and not to be believed. When GenMe is not watching TV, they’re on the Internet, sometimes on traditional-news offshoots such as cnn.com, but other times trolling through places where they have to wear their skepticism cap at every moment. Even people who are older than GenMe have learned not to forward the e-mail that says doing so will contribute money to help a child dying of cancer (it’s a hoax). We know that e-mails with the subjects “I love you” or “Your prescription has expired” are a computer virus and spam for Viagra, respectively, and can be deleted without being opened. We know that your friend’s aunt’s hairdresser did not put her poodle in the microwave to dry it off (and if we believed it for a second, we confirmed it wasn’t true on the Urban Legends reference pages on snopes.com). We are suspicious of anyone who calls on the phone and wants to sell us something. We don’t believe for a second that the “tests” in laundry-detergent ads are true.

  Prime example: the “fake news” outlets such as Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, The Colbert Report, or the satirical newspaper the Onion that are so popular among young people. GenMe enjoys knowing that it’s false—at least it’s funny and entertaining. Then there’s the other trend in journalism, the TMZ beat, or what’s generally known as infotainment. GenX grew up on the “tabloid” shows of the 1990s such as Hard Copy and A Current Affair (complete with the triangle making that whump! noise), and now even regular news outlets have taken up the cause of celebrity watching. Both trends expose the cynical attitude of GenMe. If they’re not laughing about the news, they’re laughing at the celebrities—a little schadenfreude directed toward the rich and famous people they’d like to be.

  SELF-ESTEEM VERSUS REALITY

  Generation Me has also lost hope in their ability to make choices in their own lives. In some ways, these changed attitudes seem at odds with the focus on the self. If GenMe’ers see themselves as independent individuals, why are they increasingly blaming others when things go wrong? It comes back again to the idea of self-esteem and feeling good about yourself. Suppose that you’re a student and you fail a test. If you acknowledge that you were lazy about studying—or just plain stupid—your self-esteem will suffer. If you can blame the teacher’s unfair test, however, you can slide though the experience still feeling good about yourself. We say that bad things aren’t our fault in an effort to preserve our self-confidence. “When there are few winners and many losers, it may be easier to protect one’s sense of self-worth by not trying than to try and still not succeed,” notes an education book that argues against competition. What’s the point in trying something difficult? If we do, we might learn something—even if it’s just our own limitations. But the popular GenMe belief is to protect the self at all costs. John, 23, says, “It makes more sense psychologically to believe in fate. If you don’t, your self-esteem will plummet each time you fail.”

  GenMe’ers high self-esteem also doesn’t lead them to believe they’re in control because, as one of the self-esteem programs puts it, they were taught to value “who we are and not what we do.” You’re unique and special even if you don’t work hard, so why do it? Educational psychologist Maureen Stout argues that the self-esteem movement disconnects reward from achievement, producing cynical kids. She points out that 5- and 6-year-olds start school eager to learn, but that “when they encounter teachers who give them an A just for turning up in class . . . they have no choice but to become cynical about the educative process.”

  And if they don’t become cynical then, Stout says, they will once they reach adulthood and discover that they have not been prepared for the real world. This cynicism comes from the mismatch between self-esteem and reality. GenMe’ers are faced with an unusual set of circumstances. From infancy, they were taught to express themselves, to believe in themselves, to follow their dreams. Then they enter a world where getting into an Ivy League university depends just as much on luck and circumstance as on work and talent, and where even the local public university might not admit them if they got B’s in high school. The good job or the desirable promotion might go to the person who works the hardest, or it might go to the person who catches a lucky break. Your entire romantic life might turn on the luck of meeting the right person at the right time. Even when you decide to give it up for the day and relax, you read People and watch TMZ or ESPN to worship movie stars and athletes—the modern-day gods and goddesses who, for the most part, gained their ascendance through genes and circumstan
ce. GenMe’ers parents and teachers told them how special they were but skimped on the lesson that life isn’t fair.

  LIFE DETERMINATION BY LOTTERY

  Generation Me’ers external beliefs are somewhat ironic considering the better health and safety they enjoy. Neither GenX nor GenMe has ever been drafted to fight in a war. Life expectancy is at an all-time high, and advances in medical technology and pharmaceuticals make countless lives better. Safety measures have radically improved in the last thirty years, on everything from cars to playground equipment. Can you believe that babies used to ride in cars without car seats, and that kids rode bikes without wearing helmets? Even considering the threat of terrorism, fewer negative random events occur now than in previous eras.

  It’s easy to take those things for granted, however, especially since this relatively safe world is the only one GenMe’ers have ever known. Instead they focus on the things they’ve seen change, such as the economy and the volatile job market. In an increasingly complex, competitive world, jobs and investments seem to depend more on luck than achievement. When only 5% of people are admitted to a graduate program—and most of the applicants are highly qualified—GenMe quickly learns that luck plays a big role in their lives. Or as Gaby, 20, puts it, “A typical saying in my generation is ‘I was in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.’ ”

  Recent college graduates find it difficult to summon up enthusiasm for the job market. “Putting in effort does not seem to be related to getting the appropriate reward,” says Andrea, 22. “Getting a degree does not guarantee a stable job.” Eric, 23, has the same beliefs even though he has been successful. He described being “handed” a management job in a time-share company, making $45,000 a year when he was only 18. When the company was restructured and 75% of the employees lost their jobs, Eric says he “got lucky” and wasn’t let go. Even though most of the breaks went his way, Eric says, “In truth I had nothing to do with it.”

  Though some of this attitude is based in realism, other members of GenMe have developed a skewed view of how success works. Perhaps because many role models on TV are actresses and athletes, becoming rich looks like a matter of luck. Apparently, some young people also believe that success in business usually happens overnight. Generation X Goes to College quotes Kelly, 18, who says, “Kids see people like Bill Gates who get rich out of nowhere. . . . It seems a lot of people get it that way, by not having to work. They just come into it real quick, like the lottery.” Bill Gates is many things, but he’s not a lottery winner; he founded a company and worked hard to make it grow. He may have been lucky, and he may have been opportunistic, but it’s astonishing that anyone thinks he got rich without working.

  THE VICTIM MENTALITY

  Some GenMe’ers take things too far and make excuses when things don’t go their way. Susan Peterson, who teaches at a community college in Arizona, has noticed this trend toward a lack of personal responsibility in her students: “Parents have always done [everything] for them, including choosing all their teachers in the public school system and arguing about every grade they received. As a society, we’ve created a new generation of young adults who blame everyone else for their failures.”

  In his book A Nation of Victims, social critic Charles Sykes argues, “The impulse to flee personal responsibility and blame others [is] deeply embedded within the American culture.” It’s gotten so bad, he says, that “the National Anthem has become the Whine.” Other people blame a “disease” for their ineptitude—such as the man who sued after getting fired for never showing up on time. It wasn’t his fault, he said, because he had “chronic lateness syndrome.” The Myth of Laziness author Mel Levine says there is no such thing as laziness—instead, people who can’t get things done have “output failure.” Defense attorneys will sometimes say that their clients were abused as children and are thus not responsible for their actions. And there’s always the famous Twinkies defense, that junk food and sugar are the real cause for murder. As Sykes puts it, “The plaintive cry is always the same: I am not at fault. [Fill in the Blank] made me do it.”

  Watterson’s satire of self-help books illustrates the growing popularity of blaming others for your problems and codifies the somewhat paradoxical link between externalizing blame and focusing on yourself.

  Before the 1970s, lawyers considered product-liability cases no-wins; they were matters of personal responsibility, and no jury would convict a corporation for the choices of an individual. In 1940, about 20,000 civil lawsuits were heard; by 2012, this had increased more than tenfold—or 1,000%—to around 275,000. In contrast, the number of criminal cases merely doubled over this same period, suggesting that civil lawsuits increased five times faster than they should have. You don’t even have to make a faulty product to get sued. One young man sued the Wake Forest University Law School because his professors used the Socratic method to question him and his classmates, which, he says, caused him fatigue and weight loss.

  Many other lawsuits have become the butt of numerous jokes: the woman who sued because her coffee was too hot, or the teens who sued McDonald’s for making them fat. It seems that when anything goes wrong, many people just want to sue whatever company is in reach. This is a foreign concept to the older generation. My uncle Charles, who owned an avocado farm, was using a trencher one weekend when he reached down too quickly and the machine cut off his thumb. Fortunately, doctors were able to reattach the digit. When he got back to work, one of his younger coworkers asked him if he was going to sue the company that made the trencher. “No!” exclaimed Charles. “It was my fault. Why would I sue them?” Although many people still share Charles’s attitude, others think that it’s natural to blame the product when things go wrong.

  Of course, at times excuses are real. “Personal responsibility,” a favorite mantra of many conservatives, can’t extend to cases of true racism, sexism, or lack of opportunity. Some true hardships and true explanations exist that deserve to be heard. Chris Colin was heartened when his politically conservative classmate John Doyle readily acknowledged that the playing field isn’t always level. “Hard work is still the fundamental element of success, but some people, based on their situation, their circumstances, can work as hard as they want, but unless somebody steps in and gives them that boost . . . they’re not gonna get to that level. And to say that they can . . . is foolish.”

  AN EDUCATION IN EXCUSES

  The victim mentality arises full force in schools, where teachers often bear the brunt of these attitudes. Many public school teachers have told me that parents blame them when their children don’t do well in school. Arguing over grades has become commonplace, perhaps because of the self-esteem curriculum and the “you can do anything” mentality. “Kids today have extremely high expectations,” one student said. “And if they receive a D or an F, it always winds up being the teacher’s fault somehow.”

  Community college professor Peter Sacks describes students who wouldn’t show up for class or do the required assignments and would then complain when their grades suffered. One student who turned in abysmally written papers complained to the administration about Sacks’s “tough grading.” Another student asked if she still had to do a restaurant review assignment because “I’ve had a cold all week, and so I don’t have any taste buds.” From what I have heard from faculty across the country, Sacks was observing only the first modest wave of such excuses.

  Sacks reports with irony that he had to throw out his “traditional approach to higher education whereby teachers assume students take responsibility for their decisions.” He is not alone. “Students who receive a C, D, or F on a test or paper tend to hold the teacher personally responsible,” said Daniel Kazez, a professor of music, in a letter to the editor in Newsweek. In his book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student, Emory University professor Patrick Allitt describes dealing with “those who didn’t fulfill their assignments, or who plagiarized, and are now casting about angrily for someone to blame.” Even “I meant to do th
at” has apparently become a worthwhile excuse. After Sacks pointed out some awkward passages in a student’s writing, the student claimed, “Sometimes I like to write awkwardly. It livens up the material and doesn’t make it boring.”

  Misbehavior is also explained away with excuses. In her book Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, Linda Perlstein reports that the most commonly uttered sentence at Wilde Lake Middle School is “But I didn’t do anything!” When students are asked why they were sent to the office, they say things like “Because Mrs. Wright blamed me for talking and I wasn’t even talking.” Youthful excuse making was probably common in other generations as well, but back then, parents took the teacher’s side. Now, Perlstein reports, more than half the time parents don’t back up the teachers. One veteran seventh-grade social studies teacher says, “I’m tired of the kids talking back, the parents talking back, the lack of interest in learning.”

  This is the new wrinkle: it’s not just the kids who are defiant and argumentative—it’s also the parents. Time magazine ran a cover story called “What Teachers Hate About Parents.” Teachers described parents who specified that their children were not to be corrected or “emotionally upset,” who argued incessantly about grades, and even one father who, after his daughter was reprimanded, challenged a teacher to a fistfight. In a study conducted by MetLife, new teachers ranked handling parents as their most challenging task. Parents can also take the victim mentality to new heights. One set of parents sued a school that expelled their kids for cheating, saying that a teacher had left the exam on a desk, making it easy to steal it (thus, it’s the teacher’s fault that my kid cheated and was expelled). Teachers will see this attitude more and more as GenMe’ers have their own kids and believe that they couldn’t possibly do anything wrong either.